


Harping On

by tfm



Category: Critical Role (Web Series)
Genre: F/F, Fluff
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-06-01
Updated: 2019-06-01
Packaged: 2020-04-06 01:25:23
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,046
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/19052440
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/tfm/pseuds/tfm
Summary: Beau decides to try for a nice, romantic gesture. It doesn't quite go according to plan.Post episode 65.





	Harping On

The idea came to Beau while she was sitting at the base of an enormous fucking tree in the Barbed Fields.

 

Yasha seemed thrilled at the idea that she once might have been a harp player, that she had been anything other than the “Orphanmaker” moniker granted her by her tribe. It was the first conversation that Beau had had with the other woman in so long, and yet somehow it was also the least awkward one.

 

‘I’ve seen you a _lot_ ,’ Yasha said, softly, almost to herself. Beau didn’t exactly process the words straight away. It wasn’t until hours later – well after the roc fight, well after they were back in Rosohna – that she thought about what they might have meant.

 

Or what they _potentially_ meant. After all, they didn’t mean anything, if Beau didn’t actually do something about it. Already, there was a ridiculous plan forming in her head. Yasha had been tense for as long as they’d been in Xhorhas. Beau suspected that she was having Stormlord issues, and really, this was a way to take her mind off of things.

 

This, Beau knew, was not the same as what had happened with Tori. She had lusted after Tori, for sure, and maybe even in her seventeen-year-old mind, she had loved her. Beau was older now, maybe a little bit wiser, but certainly no less smitten than she had been once upon a time.

 

Even still, it would be a gesture of friendship, that could plant the seeds for something else to happen. Maybe.

 

It had been so long since she’d even thought of Tori, let alone spoken about her.

 

Yasha was the only person she’d ever even told. Not even the only person in the Mighty Nein. The only person _ever_. Not that she exactly had many friends outside of the group. Dairon, she supposed, was something approaching a friend, but not really the sort of person she tended to divulge personal secrets to.

 

Still, Dairon was helpful in other ways.

 

‘You know Rosohna pretty well, right?’ Beau asked. They had just finished sparring, and Dairon was holding a rag to her bloody nose. It was the only hit that Beau had managed to get in; she looked a damn sight worse than Dairon did. Two black eyes, a nice cut along her scalp, and a row of bruises across her abs. Not that Beau was complaining. She liked being put through the ringer during sparring. It meant there was less chance of fucking it up during a battle, like getting paralyzed by a Gloomstalker and contributing exactly nothing except the wasting of a Healing spell.

 

‘Well enough,’ Dairon said, shortly. She was still a little (okay, a _lot_ ) peeved at the things that had transpired (and that Beau had neglected to tell her about) since they had arrived in the city. ‘While you were off gallivanting in Bozzoxan, I had some time to look around.’ Beau ignored the barb. She suspected that Dairon had put a little more effort into today’s sparring, to express her frustrations.

 

‘Do you know if there’s anywhere around where I’d be able to get a musical instrument made?’

 

Dairon stared at her. She looked as though she wanted to ask what the fuck Beau was planning on doing now.

 

‘No,’ she said.

 

 

The second, and really, only other person on Beau’s list was the Shadowhand. Or “Essek,” as he insisted on them calling him.

 

Beau had thought he’d been kind of frosty at first, refusing all of her thoughtful dinner invitations. Since he’d taken an interest in teach Caleb Dunamancy, though, he’d been spending more and more time at the Xhorhaus, locked away in the library with Caleb.

 

‘A music shop?’ he asked, thoughtfully, after one particularly long teaching session. He did stay for dinner than night, which surprised Beau. She wondered if maybe there was something a little more than magic going on behind those closed doors. ‘Yes, I believe there is one in the Firmaments. Not far from here, in fact.’ He wrote the directions down on a piece of spare paper that he’d pulled from his cloak. On the back, there were scribbles of sigils that clearly hadn’t made the cut.

 

Beau waited until one quiet Grissen afternoon when everyone was busy to make the trek. She didn’t want to have to explain her reasoning to anyone else.

 

She had heard harps being played before. Once or twice, her parents had held banquets. Ridiculous, overly formal events that Beau had utterly resented having to get dressed up for. She’d sat in a corner, sulking in her pink, frilly dress, sneaking glasses of wine, and listening to the band play.

 

For a few years, she’d been forced to take piano lessons. Sitting straight-backed on a stool, getting whacked with her tutor’s yardstick if she got a note wrong. So yeah. Music wasn’t exactly her forte.

 

It seemed, then, a perfectly reasonable thing to do to go into a music store in the richest district of Rosohna, and ask for a harp.

 

The attendant was a little skeptical; he was a tall, white-haired Drow, with a pair of glasses perched on top of a long, straight nose. He introduced himself as Seras Oman, and he was exactly the sort of person Beau would have expected to be running a music shop. Not that she’d ever really put that much thought into the sorts of people that ran music shops. He gave her a once over; looking a little judgmentally at the blood-stained vestments, and the darkening bruises across her face.

 

Still, he said, ‘Let me go and check upstairs,’ in the tone of voice that told Beau he already knew that he had one, but didn’t want to tell _her_ that.

 

He seemed to rummage around up there for almost half an hour (how long did it take to find a harp?), before coming back down, and escorting her back up.

 

The thing was enormous.

 

It stood almost a full foot taller than Beau, and at least three times as wide.

 

‘There,’ Seras said, triumphantly. He was covered in dust from head to foot. ‘The finest harp in all of Rosohna. Will set you back two thousand gold.’

 

Beau balked. ‘Have you got anything…smaller?’ Not to mention cheaper. Five thousand gold was a lot, and she couldn’t exactly imagine Yasha slinging a full-sized harp across her back next to Skingorger and the Magician’s Judge as they traveled their way across Xhorhas.

 

‘I don’t have anything here,’ he said, thoughtfully. ‘But my cousin across town is something of an amateur harpmaker…You could commission a piece, if you’d like.’

 

‘Yeah, let’s do that,’ Beau said, her mouth agreeing to the proposal before her brain had quite had time to catch up. Consequently, it was with a little embarrassment that she put down the two hundred gold deposit ten minutes later. She couldn’t change her mind now.

 

Beau asked for something that “you know, you could rock out on.” Seras frowned a little as he took down the notes, but seemed too thrilled at the prospect of being able to give his cousin work to question it.

 

By the time the day was over, Beau ‘s coin purse was a hell of a lot lighter, and her brain had caught up with the situation. _Are you crazy? Pretty girl says something nice, so you decide to go and buy her a harp?_

 

It wasn’t crazy, she tried to convince herself. She would have spent five hundred gold pieces on any one of her friends. _But on a_ harp?

 

Three weeks later, after a half-dozen more trips out of the city, after monster fights, and dramatic confrontations, and all of those other things, Beau returned with the remainder of her one-thousand gold payment, to an excited looking Seras. He had become much warmer towards her after she gave him two hundred gold pieces.

 

He unveiled the harp in all of its travel-sized glory. Barely bigger than a backpack, and made from finely carved wood. Each string was perfectly set in place. It was fucking beautiful, and Beau was glad. She would have hated to have paid five hundred gold for an ugly harp.

 

‘Great,’ Beau said, feeling kinda smug about the whole situation. ‘Now, can you teach me to play it?’

 

There was an awkward beat of silence.

 

‘You...’ Seras said, uncertainly. ‘You commissioned a harp, and you don’t know how to play it?’

 

‘Yeah,’ Beau shrugged. ‘I figured I could probably pick it up in a couple of days, right?’ That had been the plan, anyway. Since it would’ve been weird to drag Yasha all the way out here to get her to learn the harp before she even had one...The romantic thing to do would be for Beau to teach her.

 

It seemed stupid, when she thought about it now. Especially given the way Seras had put a hand to his furrowed brow. ‘The harp is delicate instrument that takes many, many years to understand even the basics, let alone becoming an accomplished harpist.’

 

Beau frowned. ‘Oh,’ she said. She’d kind of just gotten really excited about the prospect of doing something nice for Yasha, and hadn’t really considered the logistics of it.

‘What if you just want to be okay at it?’

 

Seras’s sigh deepened. He looked at Beau sympathetically. ‘Have you considered the lute?’

 

…

 

An hour and a half later, Beau knocked on the door to Yasha’s room, a package wrapped in brown paper hidden behind her back. ‘Hey Yash, you in there?’

 

‘Come in.’ Yasha’s voice was muffled by the door, which Beau swung open. Yasha was lying on her bed, staring across at the field of wildflowers that Jester had painted. The first few times that she had done this, Beau had been worried; her parents had always said that lying in bed for hours on end was a sign that someone was sick in the head. But then, her parents were kind of dicks, so what did they know.

 

‘Hey, Yash, got a minute?’

 

‘Sure.’ Yasha sat up. There was an almost serene look on her face. It was the most beautiful thing Beau had ever seen; far more beautiful than any wildflowers. ‘Is everything okay?’

 

‘Yeah, I just. I, um...I got you something,’ Beau finished, weakly. She handed Yasha the neatly wrapped package.

 

‘What is it?’ Yasha asked, even as she carefully unwrapped it. Beau imagined that she hadn’t gotten many gift-wrapped presents in the Iothia Moorland.

 

‘Oh, Beau,’ Yasha said, as she saw the lute. It wasn’t nearly as nice as the harp had been, but it was still a piece of beautiful craftsmanship. There was a look of what Beau thought might have been joy on her face. ‘I hope you didn’t spend too much money on this.’

 

‘Nah,’ Beau said. Technically the truth. She hadn’t spent a huge amount of gold on the lute. ‘I was just walking past, and happened to see it. They didn’t have a harp, unfortunately.’ Okay, that was a little less true.

 

‘It’s a good thing,’ Yasha said. ‘I hear the harp is really hard to play.’

 

‘Oh? I didn’t know that.’ Beau rummaged in her pocket. ‘Anyway, the guy at the store gave me this...scroll, I guess on basic lute playing.’ She handed it to Yasha. ‘Who knows, maybe in the band, you played the lute as well. I’ve seen some bands like that.’

 

‘We’ll see.’ Yasha was smiling. All of a sudden, before Beau could even register what was happening, Yasha was on her feet, and had kissed Beau on the cheek. Beau’s brain froze entirely. For a good second or two, she literally could not function. ‘Thank-you, Beau.’

 

‘No problem,’ Beau grinned, hoping like hell Yasha hadn’t noticed the delay in her response. ‘Just, y’know...play me a song one day.’

 

‘I will,’ Yasha promised. Already, she had the lute in her arms as if to play, and was studiously reading the scroll to figure out exactly how to do it.

 

Beau shut the door behind her, as she left. If there was a really nice harp that had been donated to a Xhorhas community orchestra, well, then no-one else would be any the wiser.

**Author's Note:**

> This was supposed to be a Comedy of Errors, but it turned into sheer fluff.


End file.
